I’m teaching a 1/2 day workshop Business of Experience: Hands-On Methods to Increase Your Influence at DocTrain West this Friday…if you’re in Vancouver and want to hang out, I’m around a bit Thursday evening and Friday afternoon….

So, I.D. magazine published this trolling article, and I can’t resist linking to Down with Innovation, precisely because it (unintentionally) makes so many of my points about business fluency for me.

I sympathize that design thinking is getting a lot of attention the business press, leaving design doing without the love it deserves. But this sort of reaction is counterproductive. We’re here to co-opt innovation, not throw a tantrum because we aren’t understood. From the article:

"The problem that designers face now is the same problem they have faced all along: how to communicate with clients who lack a basic grounding in the visual arts and don’t seem to think it matters. Businesspeople don’t need to become designers. They need to learn that there are types of awareness and understanding expressed through visual form…"

The problem isn’t business people who don’t care. That’s just juvenile abdication. The real problem is designers who don’t care enough about business to understand how to communicate the value of their work. That’s why business fluency is so important. Until designers get there, complaining about business not getting it is just venting. Instead we could spend our time inventing better ways to work with business, even if that means embracing innovation and design thinking.
thanks Black Belt Jones for the link

Here’s the simple model that I use to explain the design approach: Understand, Solve, and Evaluate (U.S.E.). This model generalizes to all kinds of framing and problem solving situations, not just product design. If you’d like to use the diagram yourself, I’m releasing it under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. Here’s a Slideshare link where you can download the diagram in PPT. I’ll work on building out a small deck that describes each of the three parts, but for now it’s just the diagram itself.

Eating lunch with my friend Matthew Milan last week in Miami, he turned to me and said "you need to blog more". Thanks for the encouragement :) I completely agree, and to build some personal momentum will be surfacing some of my ongoing interests and themes that got bplusd started three years ago this month.

Something that I’ve talked about for a few years is the idea of business fluency. I chaired a panel on speaking the language of business at the 2005 IA Summit, and and wrote about business fluency in Stanford d.school’s Ambidextrous magazine. To have greater influence in the organizations that we work with, design innovators need to cultivate an understanding of business - not that we need to get MBAs, but that we need to relate our efforts to business goals and context if we’re going to practice value centered design. Until we understand business, we’re arrogant hypocrites if (when) we complain about business ‘not getting it.’ Not getting it is just a reflection of someone operating from a different frame - and understanding and reframing are strong points for design and innovation. We have no excuses for ignoring business fluency, or expecting that business decision makers should learn our lingo instead.

When we do turn to business fluency, much of the conversation is about facts, figures, and formulas. This conceptual fluency is important, but often secondary to understanding networks, power, and motivations in an organization. That kind of cultural fluency is what really gets things done in an organization—ROI is often a red herring when the real issues are cultural.

So, a lot of our early work with clients and stakeholders involves creating artifacts that symbolize the system, rather than the literal representation of a prototype or sketch. That includes things like stories, or design the box and other design games. I see this in a lot of the generative methods that Liz Sanders shares with the community.

I’m interested in finding a good word to describe the practice of creating these artifacts, distinct from prototypes. It’s different than codesign or participatory design (which describes *who* is involved, rather than the output of the effort). Artifacting (vs. prototyping) gets at what I’m interested in, but sounds silly. Maybe with enough repetition I’ll come to love it…or if you have a brilliant alternative, let me know in the comments…I’ll keep thinking too.

Just thinking about current demands, and the halcyon days when I could take a look at the DUX 2003 conference site (where I chaired a panel session on constraints) and think that just the right thing to do was create this. Of course, a couple months later I went and started my own company, so my bandwidth for visual puns has dwindled.

I’ll be in Miami this week for the Information Architecture Summit. I’ll be teaching a day-long workshop on the Business of Experience: Building Buy-in So You Can Deliver Great Products and Services. During the main conference, I’m also talking about a model for designers to think about business in a more concrete, granular way to help practitioners target their efforts. Should be fun!

When Bruce Nussbaum called out the iPhone platform as a pillar to fight recession, and then defended his selection by pointing to Kleiner Perkin’s iFund, he committed a classic error in assessing innovation opportunity: he focused on the elephant, and overlooked the ant.

If you’ve ever had the opportunity to visit with an elephant, they are incredible animals. Beyond their sheer mass and unique look, elephants are smart and have complex social lives. And yet, with a global population under a million, their environmental impact is dwarfed by the global contribution of the lowly ant.

Though we rarely pay attention, ants are pretty amazing too. Taking advantage of their size, ants can lift 10-20 times their body mass, and have complex distributed social structures and behavior. Most importantly, ants are almost everywhere. They make up 15-20% of terrestrial animal biomass, and represent an extraordinary volume of ecological activity around the entire planet.

Looking at the innovation landscape, the iPhone looks like a bull elephant charging towards your Land Rover. It’s big. It’s moving fast. It’s unique. It’s novel. And its global economic impact is dwarfed by more mundane, more distributed innovations in sectors like healthcare and environmental products and services.

Like comparing elephants and ants, this is simply a matter of scale. Healthcare in the US is topping 2.25 trillion dollars annually. If you look at the things that green technology touches (food, energy, transport, building, communications, manufacturing, etc. etc.) the scale is similar. As I said before, that’s a heck of a lot of iPhones. In the Serengeti of Silicon Valley, there might even be the market penetration to give the illusion that the iPhone, like the elephant, rules the ecosystem. But that’s just an illusion - for every iPhone, there’s a user who consumes healthcare services and carries a deeply unsustainable footprint.

No one is arguing that the iPhone isn’t significant. It is, and it’s a leading indicator for a sea change in interaction design, from mobile to multitouch. It just pales in comparison to the broader sectors that Nussbaum also singled out for innovation investment. That’s the objection, and focusing on the iPhone might make for good copy, even good VC, but it’s poor economic policy.

Make no mistake - healthcare and the environment are the ants of the innovation landscape. If we’re going to innovate our way out of recession, that’s where to invest.

We have dates for CanUX 2008. Our annual Canadian User Experience workshop will be held November 16-18, in Banff, Alberta, Canada. Looking forward to pulling the program together, with that blend of hands-on and big picture thinking that makes it a yearly personal highlight.

I like Bruce Nussbaum a lot. He’s a huge proponent of business and design, and I think that he’s done a lot to get corporate America to recognize the value of innovation and design (thinking and doing). Maybe because I admire his efforts so much, I have a hard time when he calls out the iPhone as one of the key platforms for escaping from recession. More particularly, innovation based on the iPhone SDK is touted as comparable economic benefit to innovation in healthcare and in environmental technology (energy / water / building / manufacturing / food / waste). Really? Healthcare isn’t a 2.1 billion dollar industry - it’s a 2.1 trillion dollar industry…that’s a heck of a lot of iPhones.

I agree that innovation investment is our best hope for combating economic slowdown, but innovation hype doesn’t help, it hurts.

iPhone and social media aside, it would be great to see investment in clean energy or in new healthcare models on par with the New Deal of the 1930s.